Hacker Attack on Essential Pipeline Shows Infrastructure Weaknesses
A crucial U.S. fuel pipeline operator recently announced it had been hit by ransomware, a type of cyberattack in which hackers encrypt important data so their owners cannot access them—unless the owners pay the criminals to unlock the information. Colonial Pipeline, a private company that transports nearly half of the U.S. East Coast’s gasoline and other fuel, had to shut down 5,500 miles of its fuel pipeline as a result. The FBI has blamed the attack on a criminal group called DarkSide.
Unlike ransomware used to kidnap an individual’s computer files, lock up a university’s network or extort a hospital, attacks on major infrastructure such as Colonial Pipeline’s fuel pipeline can have enormous impacts on whole regions of the country. DarkSide’s ransomware “caused a fairly significant disruption to the fuel supply across the East Coast and caused a number of policy interventions and reactions from the administration [of President Joe Biden] about trying to make it easier to transport fuel and mitigate the impacts of that,” says Josephine Wolff, an assistant professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts University.